“My father was a towboat captain, my grandfather was a towboat captain and all my uncles were towboat captains. I grew up wanting to emulate my dad, since he was my hero.

“When I was 4½, he started taking me out on the boat with him. When I was 16, I began working on the boat during the summer. Then when I turned 19, I joined the Coast Guard, and I was in there for 10 years.

“When I got out, I tried everything I could think of to stay away from the water. Nothing worked out for me. So I thought, well, I’ll just fall back on what I know, and I went to work on towboats. I did that for more than 40 years, pushing barges up and down the intercoastal waterway.

“When I was young, I had a lot of romantic notions about being a towboat captain. But when I actually got into the work, it was no longer romantic. I wasn’t free to do what I wanted to do, like I was when I was a kid. It was just making a paycheck, although the money was great.”

When did you retire?
“I stopped when I was 72. My supervisor was constantly telling everybody that whatever I decided on the boat as the captain, he would back me up 110 percent. I had a disagreement with one of the fellas on my boat, so I called my supervisor and told him I want to get this guy off the boat. My supervisor said we can’t just arbitrarily get rid of people because you don’t want him. I said, well, you either get him off the boat or you get me off the boat. I’m leaving today if he doesn’t leave because I’m not going to get in fisticuffs with him. He’s 25 and I’m over 70. But he wouldn’t help me out, so I just walked off the boat. That was my last day.”

— Jay Railey

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“My husband and I are full-time sailors.

“We’re from Niagra County, New York, but we spent the last three years in Texarkana with our daughter and grandson while she did her family practice medical residency.

“Originally, we got a 26-foot powerboat and really enjoyed it, but decided it was too small. So we got a 39-foot Sea Ray with twin carbureted gas engines and spent every weekend on it.

“We spent our vacation circumnavigating Lake Ontario, which was about 300 miles to go all the way around and visit all the harbors. We loved it, but it cost us $1,900 in fuel for the week. That’s when we said maybe we should learn how to sail.”

— Jill Bebee

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“I found college less than stimulating by the third year, so I became a merchant seaman for a decade or so. I enjoyed all the traveling and seeing other cultures.

“One time just outside Egypt, we rescued a hawk that got tangled up in the rigging of our boat. We decided to take it to a veterinarian, but the taxi cab driver wanted to drive us all over Alexandria rather than to a vet. Even not being from there, we could tell we had driven by the same places four or five times. Then we met another cab driver who had gone to school in California. He just shut off the other driver and took us where we needed to go. They fixed up the hawk and we set it loose. Then the second cab driver invited us to his 2-year-old son’s birthday party. It was a pretty neat experience.”

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